Up until the very last minute Schumacher ...

Published on 27 July 1996 by Verstappen Info Page

Up until the very last minute Schumacher had provisional pole for his home German Grand Prix, but then came Hill and shattered Schumacher's time by half a second. To make things worse for Schumacher Berger also came in faster in his last round. Jos Verstappen had big problems in the morning session with the new air valve Hart engine. After the morning session Jos declared that he was very disappointed with the fact that the new engine caused so much problems. This morning the air bottle for the pneumatic system and water pressure were the cause of his anger. He stated that he wouldn't drive the new engine until the team has properly tested the car with the new engine. In the qualification session Jos drove with the old engine that lacks horsepower for this incredibly fast circuit and qualified 17th on the grid. Ricardo Rosset had wished a better birthday present and qualified 19th.

See German Grand Prix results for the complete results.

Jos' official statement after the qualifying session: "Our problems started this morning when we had a problem with the air-valve system. We had trouble with the air bottle for the pneumatic ystem and water pressure so we couldn't run this morning while we changed the engine. That lost a lot of set-up time as we'd changed it since yesterday."

"But we decided to stay with that set-up anyway and spent the session perfecting the car when we should really have been concentrating on qualifying. But we still had problems with oversteer in the slower corners and understeer out of the quick corners."

"Tomorrow it's important to finish, because this is a circuit which is very hard on engines and a lot of people could have engine problems..."